[M_B_S]

HAPPY NEW YEAR?


Stay indoors: Warning issued as Australia's heat wave hits record highs

By Helen Regan and Ben Westcott, CNN

Updated 0952 GMT (1752 HKT) January 16, 2019

Australia is sweltering under record-breaking temperatures as an extreme heat wave continues to sweep across the country, causing wildlife to die and fruit to cook from the inside out.

The past four days are in Australia's top ten warmest days on record, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said in a tweet on Wednesday, with all of the country's eight states and territories affected.
South Australia's Port Augusta hit a scorching 48.5 degrees Celsius (119 F) on Tuesday, the highest since records began in 1962, according to CNN affiliate Nine News. The town of Tarcoola in South Australia reached a sweltering 49 C (120 F).
***************
Have fun driving your SUV!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8

[dohboi]

(Thanks to vox at asif for these...does he post here anymore?)

One Heatwave Killed 'a Third' of a Bat Species in Australia

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46859000

Over two days in November, record-breaking heat in Australia's north wiped out almost one-third of the nation's spectacled flying foxes, according to researchers.

The animals, also known as spectacled fruit bats, were unable to survive in temperatures which exceeded 42C.

Lead researcher Dr Justin Welbergen, an ecologist, believes the "biblical scale" of deaths could be even higher - as many as 30,000 - because some settlements had not been counted.

Australia had only an estimated 75,000 spectacled flying foxes before November, according to government-backed statistics.

"This sort of event has not happened in Australia this far north since European settlement," says Dr Welbergen.

Dr Welbergen says about 10,000 bats of another species - black flying foxes - succumbed to the heat during the same two-day period.

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Australia Heatwave: Overnight Minimum of 35.9C In Noona Sets New Record

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... me-weather

-----------------

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46886798

Australia has just sweltered through at least five of its 10 warmest days on record, authorities estimate.

A section of highway connecting Sydney and Melbourne started to melt. Bats fell dead from the trees, struck down by the heat.

On the northern Great Barrier Reef, 99% of baby green sea turtles, a species whose sex is determined by temperature, were found to be female.

In outer suburban Sydney, the heat hit 47.3C (117F) before a cool change knocked it down - to the relative cool of just 43.6C in a neighbouring suburb the following day.

Scenes from a sci-fi novel depicting a scorched future? No, just the first days of 2018 in Australia, where summer is in fierce form

[dohboi]

Mortality risk from heat stress expected to hit poorest nations the hardest

https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007 ... 018-2348-2

As usual, those who did the least to create the problem will suffer/are suffering the most and the earliest from the consequences...

[Cid_Yama]

35.9C = 96.6 F

Overnight low in Noona.

[Plantagenet]

River fish dying due to extreme heat in Australia

australia-swelters-as-relentless-hot-weather-smashes-records


Australia used to call itself "the lucky country." Now they aren't so lucky anymore......

[dohboi]

More on this story:

‘It’s like hell here’: Australia bakes as record temperatures nudge 50C [= 122°F ]

It was 48.9C last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests makes solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”

It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.

Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.

The tiny town of Noona – population 14 – reached the highest minimum ever recorded overnight in Australia – 35.9C was the coldest it got, at 7am on Friday. It was 45C by noon.

A record fell on Tuesday in Meekatharra in Western Australia – the highest minimum there ever recorded (33C). Another fell on Wednesday, 2,000 miles away, in Albury, New South Wales – their hottest day (45.6C).

It was 45C or higher for four consecutive days in Broken Hill – another record – and more than 40C for the same time period in Canberra, the nation’s capital. Nine records fell across NSW on Wednesday alone. Back in Port Augusta, Tuesday was the highest temperature since records began in 1962. ...

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... es-records

[Cid_Yama]

WE call it a heat wave, but it has become the new normal summer in Australia. It is now happening every summer, and foreshadows what we will soon experience in the US.

This is what the near future looks like.

[dohboi]

I think, when you keep breaking records like they have in the last couple weeks, a better term would be 'the new abnormal.'

This is true, or soon to be true, of most places on the globe, for quite some time.

It's not just that we are switching to some new, stable 'normal,' and that's gonna be that.

We have profoundly destabilized the entire global climate system (and much else), and we be constantly hitting new extremes of all sorts, but especially new record hot nights and warm winters. Here in MN, we just had the latest date ever that we hit our first winter temperature below 0 F (~-18 C).

At this point there is really no end in sight for when we will stop hitting ever new heat and other such records. There is no 'new normal,' just more and more abnormalities.

Meanwhile, back in Aus:

Sydney suffers in heatwave as NSW temperatures soar past 46 degrees Celsius (= ~ 115 F)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-18/ ... c/10723824

Railway travel is affected, in part due to the risk of steel rails buckling in the heat

https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index. ... #msg187077

Train commuters are being warned to expect delays as fears grow the networks will buckle due to the severe heatwave battering the country.

https://www.dresstle.com/2019/01/16/fea ... e-strikes/

Sydney commuters will be confronted by mysterious signs while travelling on the train network this week. “WOLO” is not an acronym, but it means trains are travelling slower due to extreme heat conditions.

“There’s very little we can do when you’ve got this degree of heat hitting steel tracks (but) at the same time we want to make sure we’ve got the staff on board as quickly as possible to be able to respond.”

https://www.news.com.au/technology/envi ... 17fa52ced4

[Cid_Yama]

Australia uses electric trains. Last summer the insulation on the lines providing power to the trains melted off, stranding people in unpowered train cars, so no AC, in lethal temperatures.

[BlinkBlink]

Adelaide has had the hottest day on record.
https://www.theage.com.au/environment/w ... 50thk.html

Melbourne is going to get to 44 tomorrow, with 29 overnight. Might break the all time overnight record.

Probable blackouts too.

Good times.

[dohboi]

For the rest of us ignorant 'merikuns, 44 C +~ 111 F !

[dohboi]

120°F in the Shade—and By the Water—As Australia’s Record-Melting Summer Intensifies

by Bob Henson | Category 6 | Weather Underground

At least 28 locations hit all-time highs on Thursday. In Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, the official West Terrace station rocketed to 46.6°C (115.9°F)—the highest temperature ever recorded at the designated reporting sites for any of Australia’s state or territorial capitals. About 200 miles away, the city of Port Augusta hit its all-time high on Thursday with a blistering 49.5°C (121.1°F). That’s unnervingly close to the nation’s all-time high of 50.7°C (123.3°F), notched at Oodnadatta, South Australia, on January 2, 1960.

The Port Augusta reading is exceptional in another way: it’s the highest temperature ever recorded at a coastal location in the Southern Hemisphere, according to independent weather researcher Maximiliano Herrera. This includes oceans, seas, gulfs, and lakes, Herrera said. Port August sits near the head of Spencer Gulf, north of Adelaide.

Just a day earlier, on Wednesday, the Red Rocks Point station—which faces Antarctica from the Nullarbor coast of Western Australia—hit 49.1°C (120.4°C). According to Blair Trewin (AU Bureau of Meteorology), the Red Rocks Point station is located only 70 meters (230 feet) from the water. “This is the highest temperature recorded anywhere in the world at such a close distance from an open ocean,” Herrera said. He noted that the sea surface temperature at the time was 22-23°C (72-73°F), quite chilly when compared to the sizzling atmosphere.
...
This summer's brutal heat is having major impacts on thousands of feral horses, donkeys, and cattle, among other creatures....

Fire danger on Friday was running at severe to extreme levels across much of Victoria, prompting a fire weather warning for several districts and a statewide fire ban. The fire risk is also very high to extreme in Tasmania, where at least 29 fires were reportedly out of control late Thursday. Friday marks the start of the Australia Day holiday weekend, which commemorates the nation’s founding. ...

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/120F- ... ntensifies

[dohboi]

Another major die off of fish, not exclusively due to heat...if major water resources hadn't been diverted to cotton fields and for mining, they may have had a better chance of surviving...

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... est-deaths

[jawagord]

Calgary is experiencing its longest stretch of cold weather in 21 years.

The temperature in Calgary has not made it above -11 C since Feb. 2, 2019. Doug Vaessen has details on the bitter cold.
Many Canadians have been battling unusually cold weather since the beginning of February. Record low temperatures have been shattered throughout the country and winter weather warnings have become commonplace.
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/globalnews. ... treak/amp/

[dohboi]

Reports of cold weather extremes are quite literally and directly OFF F'ING TOPIC in a thread entitled: HEAT WAVES 2019

But thanks for the interesting stat. As you well know by now, a well established fact about climate change is that it destabilizes systems leading to all sorts of unexpected extremes. The much predicted anomalous warming of the Arctic means that cold from that region is sometimes going to be displaced into the lower latitudes.

Saying that this doesn't make sense is a simplistic as saying that storms in extremely hot summers shouldn't produce hail. That's really exactly how stupid you sound by bringing this up here. But please, keep bringing this stupid stuff up so you will show your self to everyone and their neighbor to be a total and utter idiot and/or hypocrite.

[clif]

Calgary is experiencing its longest stretch of cold weather in 21 years.

Interesting that Calgary is colder than most of the state of Alaska including Nome ...... and colder than most of Scandinavia .... or the North western coast of Russia in the Barents Sea area.

Little to do with AGW but interesting none the less.